Family Britain, 1951-1957 (35 page)

Most seaside resorts were predominantly for the working class, but predictably there were some social gradations. ‘All over Britain,’ Ian Jack has recalled, ‘smaller resorts drew the kind of people who were offended by too much vulgarity and alcohol, and therefore preferred Millport over Rothesay [both of them favourite destinations, ‘doon the watter’, during Glasgow’s holiday fortnight, Glasgow Fair, in the second half of July], Southport over Blackpool, Tynemouth over Whitley Bay, Mablethorpe over Skegness. I think of their preferences as towns marked by an improving hush, with dads bending over rock pools and mums knitting on the promenade.’ There were certainly distinctions when it came to the bestselling postcards of Donald McGill, for whom Blackpool, Scarborough and Brighton were his surefire resorts. ‘Ultra-respectable towns, like Eastbourne and Frinton, won’t display them,’ he remarked in 1954. ‘They say they are vulgar – I suppose you might say that of Shakespeare? People who think joke cards are vulgar are worthy people who have forgotten how to laugh – they can only snigger.’46

Each resort, respectable or less so, had its own characteristics. Newquay was identified by Arnold Russell on his 1951
Reynolds News
tour of seaside resorts as a ‘bright, breezy, clean resort’, no longer reliant for its living on pilchard fishing, and where ‘on every side one hears the accents of Scotland, the Midlands and London’. Great Yarmouth, holiday destination for ‘a huge, essentially decent, working-class population’, he praised as ahead of the post-war curve with its ‘clinics and crèches where children can safely be left in the care of professional nurses, paddling pools and toddlers’ centres’. Bracing Skegness had a similar clientele. ‘We went there every year for as long as I can remember, local people like us tended not to go too far away from home,’ remembered the shotputter Geoff Capes, one of a ganger’s nine children, about his childhood in the Lincolnshire fens. ‘I used to fish off the pier, caught shrimps, went cockling, went back to the caravan and boiled them up.’ Up the coast in Scarborough, where some three-quarters of each summer’s two million or so visitors were from Yorkshire, attractions included Corrigan’s Fair, the Spa’s dance halls, cafés and bandstand, Tom Perry’s Aquatomics in the huge swimming pool at the far end of the South Bay, and the twice-weekly packed terraces of the Open Air Theatre, with some 8,000 watching shows like
The
Desert Song
. In Morecambe, or ‘Bradford-on-Sea’, the theatrical highlight each summer was the return of the local-born Thora Hird to star in the comedy
Ma’s Bit of Brass
. ‘A bit mawkish, sometimes, but a brilliant comedienne,’ recalled Robert Stephens about acting with her, adding that ‘people were hanging from the rafters, you couldn’t get a seat’. These were booming times for Morecambe – typified by how 13 ‘specials’, including one train bringing 3,600 holiday-makers from Yorkshire, came even during the ‘mackintosh Whit’ of 1952 – as they were also for the somewhat more upmarket Douglas on the Isle of Man, each summer a home from home for thousands of Mancunians and Liverpudlians. Its ballrooms, including the Villa Marina, the Palace and the Derby Castle, were among the largest in Europe. ‘I like the Palace dance hall best,’ noted one appreciative observer, John Betjeman. ‘It has a parquet floor of sixteen thousand square feet and room for five thousand people. It is in a gay baroque style, cream and pink inside, and from the graceful roof hang Japanese lanterns out of a dangling forest of flags. A small and perfect dance band strikes up – ah, the dance bands of the Isle of Man! Soon a thousand couples are moving beautifully, the cotton dresses of the girls like vivid tulips in all this pale cream and pink, the sports coats and dark suits of the men a background to so much airy colour . . .’47

Nowhere quite beat Blackpool. The Golden Mile, the Tower (including its ballroom with Reginald Dixon at the Mighty Wurlitzer, its circus with the multi-instrumental, much-loved Clown Prince Charlie Cairoli), the Big Wheel, the Pleasure Beach (including the legendary Big Dipper), the three piers, top live shows seemingly everywhere (to take just one week in July 1951, Vera Lynn at the Opera House, Elsie and Doris Waters at the Palace Variety, Wilfred Pickles in
Hobson’s Choice
at the Grand, Ted Heath and his Music at the Empress Ballroom, Al Read at the Central Pier, Dave Morris at the South Pier), the Ice Show, the Tussaud waxworks, boxing, wrestling and greyhound racing – all this, and Stanley Matthews too, made Blackpool a secular heaven for millions. The Blackpool landlady, traditionally ‘all bosom and bark’, in reality not quite so fearsome, did her bit in the town’s countless guest houses; but even her mainly sympathetic historian, John Walton, concedes that in the 1950s ‘price-cutting and the resultant corner-cutting remained permanent features of the less prosperous end of the industry, and complaints of “full board” which only amounted to two frugal meals a day, or of surcharges for basic services, still flowed freely every season’.48

Overall, it was not a place that much commended itself to a political class bent on ever-wider social and cultural improvement. ‘Blackpool, with its ugliness and high prices, is the supreme example of the commercial exploitation of working-class limitations,’ declared the
New Statesman
’s ‘Critic’ after the Labour Party’s 1949 conference there:

All the pleasures of a big industrial city have been concentrated on a stretch of Lancashire coast where sea-bathing is almost impossible, trees find it difficult to survive, and beauty is excluded by every device of man’s contriving. The only noble feature of the place is the trams, which are handsome and very fast. Walking on the sea-front in the evening you can see the mountains of Cumberland a few miles to the north, and reflect on what Cyril Joad [the well-known radio philosopher] has called the ‘drainage system’ which preserves the quiet of our countryside by canalising working-class holiday-makers into places like Blackpool and Southend, where their year’s savings are painlessly removed from their pockets in a few days.

Still, at least it was not Blackpool’s rival further up the coast. ‘I have just got back from Morecambe,’ Clement Attlee told his brother after the party’s conference there three years later. ‘Architecturally it ranks a good second to Blackpool, the former beats it in the atrocious ugliness of its buildings, but Morecambe pulls up on complete absence of planning. Our hotel wing was, however, very comfortable.’

Broadly speaking – with going abroad effectively not an option in terms of either affordability or available foreign currency – the British holiday-maker took what he got. Some July 1951 vox pop, ‘picked at random’ by the local Blackpool paper from ‘the crowds on central promenade’, suggested a fairly high degree of satisfaction:

This is the fourth year we have come. We like your ballrooms and swimming pools, they are so lovely. We can’t think of anything we don’t like. Blackpool to us is just wonderful.
(Audrey Milburn and Jean Stanley, 20-year-old unmarried girls from Shepherd’s Bush)

The big thing about Blackpool is that when it rains there are plenty of places to go. There are lovely entertainments without going to the sideshows on Central Beach.
(Mrs P. Anderson of Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, on her second visit in two years)

Blackpool has some lovely walks, that’s what I like about it. I don’t like drinking but I do like to pop in and have a pot and continue my walk.
(Mr J. J. Murray, 64, of Bishop Auckland, Co Durham, who had started coming to Blackpool with his father before the Great War)

There is only one Blackpool, but I do feel that the prices of things for the children – toy windmills, buckets and spades, and other things for the sands – are sometimes high. A charge of 1s 9d for a toy windmill is, to my mind, too big.
(Mr I. Blackwood, of New Cumnock, Ayrshire, with his wife on their first holiday since their wedding two years earlier)

You can have a quiet holiday or a gay one. It caters for everyone – and the air is so wonderful.
(Mr and Mrs W. Hallas, of Eastmoor, Wakefield)

More generally, not just in Blackpool, it seems that two criteria mattered most to holiday-makers. The first, articulated in September 1951 by a
Reynolds News
reader (‘J. F.’ of Carlton Vale, London NW6), was value for money:

My wife, two children and I went to Ramsgate.

BOUQUETS:

To a landlady for perfect digs, spotless rooms, good food, moderate charges within anybody’s reach (I am a postman). To kind, courteous townspeople and shop assistants. To reduced prices for children at cinemas.

BRICKBATS:

A large one to the corporation for charging 2d for the lifts from beach to promenade, with additional charges for prams and bathchairs.

A second big one for the number of slot machines out of order (children lose shillings a week), three charges a day for deck chairs, and the prices for so-called children’s amusements.

The other criterion was wet-weather facilities, with Blackpool clearly an exception rather than the rule. ‘On a wet day what has Morecambe to offer?’ a disgruntled Mr W. Dixon of Halifax rhetorically asked a local reporter in August 1951. ‘I went for a walk on Sunday morning and saw visitors crowding into every available inch of shelter. They all looked miserable, and cast anxious looks towards the sky . . .’ Soon afterwards Arnold Russell, having completed his tour of seaside resorts, echoed the complaint: ‘In Scarborough and Margate, South Wales and Hastings, I saw families soaked to the skin, staring hopelessly at emptying grey skies, fervently wishing they were home again. Disappointed youngsters had become fractious, mother was near a nervous breakdown, and Dad was ready to emigrate – on his own.’ For these unhappy families, he added, there was ‘no option but to trail back to an already overcrowded boarding house, to a landlady who didn’t want them while she did her cleaning and cooking’.49

‘There are queues for everything,’ Russell at the start of the August Bank Holiday weekend had reported from Margate, widely acknowledged as the Blackpool of the south and a particular magnet for holiday-making Midlanders. ‘For cinemas and theatres, for milk bars and pubs, at ice-cream kiosks and at whelk stalls . . .’ Nowhere was more crowded than Dreamland, ‘jammed with hilarious holiday-makers finding out if the Butler really did see what he wasn’t supposed to, pouring thousands of pennies into every kind of amusement machine, shrieking themselves into hysteria on giant dippers and whirling cars, and capping every thrill with an endless succession of plates of cockles’. What exactly was Dreamland? An advertisement in June 1953 extolled its Amusement Park (‘open all day and every day’, featuring ‘Europe’s newest thrill – the giant Sky Wheel’), its illuminated Magic Garden and fully licensed Swiss Beer Garden (‘A Five-Acre Enchanted Fairyland’), and its cinema, ballroom and Sunshine Theatre (mainly for Variety).

It was probably later that summer in Margate that Lindsay Anderson shot his 11-minute
O Dreamland
, eventually shown in 1956 as one of the pioneering Free Cinema films. Against a soundtrack alternating between the canned laughter of a mechanical dummy policeman and a jukebox playing two of 1953’s big hits – Frankie Laine’s ‘I Believe’ and Muriel Smith’s ‘Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me’ – he produced a social document of, in Gavin Lambert’s fine analysis, ‘a deep, already troubled ambivalence’:

The candid camerawork, mainly in close shot, shows faces reacting to everything with the same almost catatonic lack of expression. A child blinks at Rosenberg strapped in the electric chair [a macabre recreation of the execution of the atom spy], a tired elderly woman slurps tea as she stares at an ‘artistic’ nude statue, Bingo players intone the numbers after the caller, like churchgoers mechanically repeating the Lord’s Prayer after the minister. The camera also explores other body parts, feet shuffling across ground fouled with litter, tremendous buttocks spilling over counter stools. There is no spoken commentary, only an implied unanswered question: If this is Dreamland, what kind of nightmare is everyday life?

Sometimes the crowd seems as ugly and mindless as the lunatic cackling dummy, sometime as pathetically trapped as the lion in its cage . . .50

Was this deal – for people’s precious spare time – enough? Were they happy? Or just resigned? For better or worse,
O Dreamland
marked the start of a new, increasingly high-profile phase in the long, difficult, love–hate relationship of the left-leaning cultural elite with the poor old working class, just going about its business and thinking its own private, inscrutable thoughts.

9

I’ve Never Asked Her In

Before slum clearances and high-rise, before affluence, before mass immigration, before social mobility, before the spread of car ownership and the ubiquitous coming of the box in the corner – was there that most precious, most elusive thing we call ‘community’? Ricky Tomlinson, recalling in 2003 his working-class Liverpool childhood in the 1940s and early to mid-1950s, seemingly had no doubt that, notwithstanding the city’s Protestant/Catholic sectarianism, such a thing truly existed on the most local, intimate scale:

No one was rich and no one was poor in Lance Street. We were all in the same leaky boat – struggling to make ends meet . . .

Everyone knew everyone in Lance Street. No doors were ever locked. You just knocked and walked in. The street was just wide enough for two cars to pass although I can’t remember ever seeing two cars in the street at the same time.

There were around sixty houses and most had children. I can name virtually every family. The Flemmings had seven boys and the Muskers seven girls. Then there were the Taggarts, Moores, Bains and Jennings . . .

In the long twilights we played catch and chase games on the street like ‘Tic’ and ‘Alalio’. Most of the boys had wooden tommy guns or sometimes the real thing, with the firing pin removed. These had been bought for a couple of coppers after the war when fellas would come round the streets with handcarts selling old rifles.